We Can’t Forget About Puerto Rico and Houston

By ELIZABETH VALENTIN Arts Editor

It has been six months since Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico and devastated the people who live there, nearly half of whom live below the poverty level.

Puerto Rico is a part of the United States and its citizens are American citizens by birth. They received little support from the American government and FEMA announced on Jan. 31 that they would cut off their supplies to Puerto Rico. In early February, FEMA called for 30 million meals to be sent to the island to help those who have little to no food resources, but only 50,000 meals were actually delivered.

Today the power in Puerto Rican has mostly returned, but is patchy at best, as it turns off for hours at at time, unexpectedly. Despite the fact that most of the island has power again, some 200,000 families are still living without power 6 months after the storm.

In addition to the still high numbers of people who are living without power, suicide hotlines have reported an increase in the mental health struggles. There have been a reported 4,500 calls to suicide hotlines on the island, which is more than double the number of calls that they received before the hurricane.

Nearly a quarter of a million people have left Puerto

Rico, but poorest citizens, who did not have the means to flee have become stuck.

While Puerto Rico has been hit by a devastating hurricane and has been mostly forgotten by our government, which does little to help the island, they are not the only ones being neglected.

In a report published by the Associated Press and the Houston Chronicle, government files show that over 100 toxins have been released in Houston since the hurricane. Only two of these toxins became public knowledge.

The federal government has not looked into many of the toxins that have been released into Houston. Similarly, our federal government has done little to help Houston to return to the state that it was in before the hurricane.

We as a nation need to con tinue to put a spotlight on the areas that have been affected and are largely still impacted by the major storms that we saw last year. We need to continue to remind ourselves that these people are still suffering. If we don’t live there and are not directly impacted, it can be easy to let it slip out of our memories, but for the people who live there and lived through it, this is still an issue. It should be an issue for all of us until it is no longer an issue for them.

More than six months after Hurricane Harvey, new reports have shown that Houston has been largely affected by poisonous reservoirs. No one know the exact amount of damage that has been done, or which companies should be held responsible for the pollution.